Correspondence

摘要

In the recent issue of Marine Pollution Bulletin devoted to the "Implementation of the Water Framework Directive in European marine waters", Muxika et al. (2007) have proposed a new tool named M-AMBI. This last was presented as an objective tool and seemed powerful since it combines H', S and AMBI values in a unique value to assessing the ecological quality status (EcoQS) of water bodies from benthic data. We have used their software with our benthic data from the Bay of Seine and the Seine estuary (see Dauvin et al., 2007) and we have found that two identical samples taken into account in two successive analyses using the same reference conditions can correspond to two different M-AMBI values and consequently to two different ecological statuses.